Should we care about Web censorship in China?
Aside from air pollution, the one issue that has occupied the final days before the Beijing Olympics is Internet censorship.
Upon arriving in Beijing, many visiting journalists settled into the Main Press Centre (MPC), north of the Olympic Park, and discovered that access to some Web sites they tried to visit was blocked, namely those of pressure groups, including Amnesty International (AI) and Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders, RSF), and Chinese sites like BBC Chinese and the simplified Chinese version of Wikipedia.
[ Related reading: Olympic chief: 'no deal' on China Net censorship ]
The prisoners of conscience some of those sites represent deserve more attention than access to the sites themselves.
Most media reports played up the fact that access at the MPC was blocked. They never mentioned that the average Chinese user experiences the same level of access every day. Nor did they mention that a simple proxy server or anonymous surfing site would get them to the sites they wanted to see.
[ Related reading: Group offers tools to evade China's Web censorship ]
The ensuing uproar drew first an admission from an International Olympic Committee (IOC) official that a deal had been made to accept limited censorship, then an adamant denial by IOC President Jacques Rogge that there was no such agreement. In between those two statements, the sites mentioned above and some others all became available, although others, including the blogging site Typepad, remain blocked.
The question is, is this really an important issue, especially for the Olympics, to anyone other than a bunch of reporters?
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I agree that the "detention
I agree that the "detention and prosecution of those who use the Internet as a means of free expression deserve the spotlight." However, having lived in Beijing, I believe the difficulty with which information from the outside filters into mainland China goes far in shaping the perception of the average Chinese citizen. Piercing the "Great Firewall" has the effect of making information available to the society at large, and while much of it may not be of interest to the average Chinese Internet user, the free-flow of information does have a positive impact. And that free-flow is not just between outside China and inside either.> The average Internet user never runs up against the so-called "Great Firewall of China" because he or she has no interest in what AI, RSF and other foreign sites have to say.
I have quiet a few friends who would be interested in reading the BBC's website (hardly a fringe political site!) were it available.
>For the most part, the issue of Internet censorship in China is like this....
No, it's not just that. I talk almost daily with friends in mainland China over MSN and using other tools, and with increasing regularity, parts of the conversation will be dropped when we accidental hit keywords that are deemed too sensitive. This occurs when chatting within China too. Discourse is limited, and therefore the ability to think collectively is also. Perhaps though you consider this separate from the "Great Firewall" and part of the machinery that snared the cyber-dissidents you mention.
> That doesn't even mention that only a limited number of Americans would be able to understand the sites, likely written in Italian, even if they could view them.
Since English is a requirement in many schools, I don't believe this is a valid comparison.